Small portions, the foodists tell us, are increasingly the fashion in restaurants, overcoming the more-is-more attitude that has governed American stomachs for so long. So the timing seems right for Primary Stages’ 20th-anniversary revival of David Ives’s “All in the Timing,” one of the zestier plates of theatrical tapas to be had.

Calorie counters will be glad to know that, unlikely many a tasting banquet, this happy (and slap-happy) evening of mini-plays, which opened on Tuesday night at 59E59, leaves you feeling lighter than when you sat down to it. Please note that I said lighter, not emptier.

There’s nutrition in these airy, meringuelike delicacies, and surprising substance in their silliness. That’s not just because “All in the Timing,” directed by John Rando, concerns classic subjects that continue to cause debate among would-be heirs to Einstein: uncertainty, randomness, relativity and the practical implications of the existence of black holes.

Now don’t be alarmed if, like me, you’re not on intimate terms with Schrödinger’s cat. You definitely don’t have to have been a physics major to grasp the essence of these tickling comedies.

You just need to be a person who has muttered common but inescapable conditional phrases like “What if” or “If only.” And if you’ve ever been paralyzed by the infinite possibilities of a blank page, a first date or a restaurant menu, you’ll plug right into “All in the Timing.”

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From left, Matthew Saldivar, Carson Elrod and Liv Rooth, who appear to hear, see and speak no evil in the 20th-anniversary revival of “All in the Timing,” a collection of offbeat sketches.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

This anthology of sketches was the show that established Mr. Ives as a playwright with a singular gift for turning writerly self-consciousness into short-form intellectual slapstick. That talent has since been applied to sprightly adaptations of Molière, Corneille and Twain; reworkings of vintage musical books for the Encores! concert series; and, most conspicuously, the Broadway hit “Venus in Fur” two years ago.

That dark, two-person comedy — which made a star of its leading lady, Nina Arianda — is the fullest demonstration of Mr. Ives’s knack for ringing reverberant variations on a single theme. Even at 95 minutes, it flirted with the danger of milking itself dry before it ended. But in following the corkscrew course of one increasingly mysterious actress’s audition for an increasingly smitten director, “Venus” breathed a giddy, true fan’s belief in theater as an endlessly transformative exercise. If some people felt dissatisfied with the script’s concluding revelation, that was partly because Mr. Ives had set up a story that was never meant to end.

The playlets of “All in the Timing” don’t really have proper endings either, nor should they. Each exudes the sense of concluding on an ellipsis — of dot-dot-dot ad infinitum — suggesting that what we’ve just witnessed could keep on happening forever and ever.

They’re all brain teasers, given juicy theatrical life by a bouncy young cast and a clever technical team that includes the fertile set designer Beowulf Boritt. But what makes the quick-sketch antics on display here throb affectingly are their visceral feelings of frustration and wonder. Among the main causes of those feelings? The limits and limitlessness of the tools of human communication. I mean those fallible, shimmering entities known (to borrow one of the plays’ titles) as “Words, Words, Words.”

That work takes off from the premise that three monkeys, left alone in a room with three typewriters, will eventually produce Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” In this case, they have been named — by an annoyingly whimsical (and unseen) scientist — Swift, Kafka and Milton. And as played by Carson Elrod, Liv Rooth and Matthew Saldivar, they are resentful, resigned, occasionally excited and mostly daunted.

Like much of “All in the Timing,” the monkey sketch is made up of crude physical humor, wiseguy academic references and jokes of highly varying sophistication, all embodied with vaudevillian gusto by the performers. And somehow this blend of blatant shtick winds up summoning the bewilderment and anxiety that we all face, on some level, whenever we sit down to write even a simple letter. So many choices, so many ways we could miss out on saying what we want or need to say. It’s enough to drive anyone into a simian frenzy of head scratching.

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Jenn Harris and Carson Elrod in "All in the Timing."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Words, Words, Words” is sandwiched between two other plays about language and its discontents, featuring verbally challenged human characters. In “Sure Thing,” a boy (Mr. Elrod) meets a girl (Ms. Rooth) in a cafe, where they are allowed by Mr. Ives to keep restarting their conversation until it leads them into the realm of happily ever after.

In “The Universal Language,” the evening’s high point, a stuttering woman (Jenn Harris) shows up in a classroom where a soi-disant professor (Mr. Elrod again) waits to teach the world his answer to Esperanto.

It is called Unamunda, and it is a desperate, free-associating amalgam of substitutions, like “Velcro” for “Welcome” and “Harvard U” for “How are you?” It is as fraudulent, arbitrary and silly as, well, pretty much any language, when you come to think of it. But it allows its characters to make music together, as words connect into a pulsing, transporting jive talk, given blissful life by Ms. Harris and the inexhaustibly nimble Mr. Elrod.

The show’s second half is less about language and more about time. (For me it’s also less satisfying, but then I’m a word man.) It includes one sketch in which the composer Philip Glass buys a loaf of bread to the time-bending, repetitive rhythms of a Glass collaboration with the avant-garde director Robert Wilson.

In another, a diner becomes the setting for a meeting of souls lost in space (or wrenched out of the sensibilities of their own New York City and thrust into those of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Cleveland).

The concluding play allows Leon Trotsky (Mr. Saldivar) to reflect upon the last day of his life, assisted by his wife (Ms. Rooth) and his assassin (Eric Clem). Such contemplation is made possible by the divine grace of the universe-shaping deity which every writer of fictions becomes. Mr. Ives places his exiled Russian, an ax sticking out of his head, in a time warp in which destiny is played in a loop, and Trotsky can marvel for eternity at the strange convergences of history.

Playwrights are of course as bewildered as all of us by the imponderables of time and space and the language with which we try to explain them. But they at least can play God, and indulge us with a world that, like a good joke, has a pattern, a punch line and the fleeting illusion that we “get it.”

A version of this review appears in print on February 13, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Vignettes That Return To Tease, Touch and Jab. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe